Phenomenology

views updated

PHENOMENOLOGY.

CLASSIC PHENOMENOLOGY
EXISTENTIALIST PHENOMENOLOGY
BIBLIOGRAPHY

The term phenomenology signifies in its Greek sense the study or science of phenomena as they appear to human subjectivity. As systematically formulated by the founder of the twentieth-century phenomenology movement, the German philosophy professor Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), it implies a return to a theory of perception, language, and knowledge that describes the various ways in which the world and its objects appear to human subjectivity as an agent of truth.

CLASSIC PHENOMENOLOGY

Husserl, first trained as a mathematician in Austria, turns to the philosophical justification of ideal mathematical and logical objects in his self-ascribed "breakthrough" work, the two-volume Logical Investigations (1900–1901). In these investigations, Husserl is concerned to safeguard the ideality of mathematical, logical, linguistic, and perceptual meanings and the transcendent objects to which they refer. In doing so, he argues against the common nineteenth-century psychological reduction of mental acts that intend ideal logical and mathematical theorems to mere immanent psychic phenomena.

The foundational principle of phenomenology is the notion of intentionality, a conception of the structure of the mind's presentations of the world according to which every act of consciousness, be it perception, expression, knowledge, imagining, or memory, is always a consciousness of something beyond itself. In the influential sixth Logical Investigation, Husserl goes beyond the prevailing Kantian restriction on the role of unconceptualized intuition as noncognitive and argues for the ability of the mind to intuit not just simple objects but also relations between objects or states of affairs. So, for example, one perceives relations of "a is next to b" or that "S is p" and what is thereby disclosed in the self-evidence of consciousness is being itself. The phenomenological conception of truth is then articulated not as correctness or accuracy of judgments but as the disclosure of objects and states of affairs in their being to and for the mind that intends them.

If intentionality and its disclosure of the primordial manifestation of truth is Husserl's legacy to the following generations of phenomenologists, his later "transcendental turn" remains the principal subject of contention in continental philosophy in the early twenty-first century. In his Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology (1913), Husserl proposes the method of reduction, or bracketing, of our naive beliefs in the transcendent existence of worldly objects. This is considered necessary to reveal the nonempirical, or theoretical, capacity of the transcendental ego to constitute the sense of objects to appear as they do according to strict laws of correlation between intentional acts that, for example, perceive an object, and the object is perceived.

Husserl's most famous student and successor to his academic chair in Freiburg, Germany, was Martin Heidegger (1889–1976). Heidegger reconceives intentionality as a fundamentally practical directedness toward the world in our existential projects. In his landmark Being and Time (1927), he lays the groundwork for many subsequent existentialist themes by arguing that the primordial phenomena as encountered by the self manifest themselves in our authentic or inauthentic attitudes toward nontheoretical situations into which we are "thrown." These attitudes toward our existential projects must be adopted within the contexts of emotion, temporality, language, and in particular death. Throughout his writings, Heidegger rediscovers the Greek roots of the question of metaphysics as the question of the distinction between ordinary beings and their mode of being, or, as he puts it, as the question of the Being of beings.

EXISTENTIALIST PHENOMENOLOGY

In the immediate wake of Husserl and Heidegger, two French thinkers appropriated these phenomenological themes and set them more firmly into an existentialist context, where what is at stake is not so much the cognitive aspects of intentionality but our concrete embodied and meaningful human experiences. Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961) attempts to reconcile idealist and empiricist approaches to perception in his masterwork, Phenomenology of Perception (1945). Having intensively studied the late Husserl's texts on perception and embodiment, Merleau-Ponty brought to bear the findings of early twentieth-century Gestalt psychology in his argument against the dominant empiricist notion of perception. Fundamental to his work is the insight that the perception of a Gestalt figure characterizes the capacities of the embodied perceptual subject as much as, or even more significantly than, the simple passive response to external stimuli. Particularly influential on Merleau-Ponty was Christian von Ehrenfels (1859–1932), who introduced the term Gestalt in his groundbreaking 1890 study, "On Gestalt Qualities." The key principle of Gestalt psychology, which resonates with Husserl's notion of an intuitive grasp of holistic relations, is that a perceived whole, whether an event, a relation, or a complex and structured figure, cannot be reduced to the influence of atomistic sense stimuli. One might think here of the changing aspects of a familiar figure-ground image, in which one alternately sees two faces looking at each other or a candelabra, on the basis of the exact same sense data. Merleau-Ponty's appropriation of Gestalt psychology leads to his notion that it is only through a foreground and a background, the bodily horizons which are forever changing as the body moves in space and time, that perception as an existential phenomenon can be understood.

Although Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) is perhaps best known for his 1938 existentialist novel La nausée and his monumental 1943 Being and Nothingness, he spent a good part of the 1930s studying the works of Husserl and Heidegger in Berlin. His earliest works focus on applying intentionality to emotional and imaginary experiences, although he disagreed vehemently with Husserl's conception of a transcendental ego beyond an empirical self. His early concern with nontheoretical meaningfulness in a seemingly meaningless world led him to his celebrated 1946 manifesto, "Existentialism and Humanism," a clarion call to those shattered by the ruins of World War II to fill the apparent void of objective meaning with one's own radical freedom. At this point Sartre's earlier existentialist phenomenology departs from the roots of classical phenomenology in its abandonment of the descriptive approach to phenomena that disclose themselves as meaningful in themselves.

The lasting significance of phenomenology after World War II is visible particularly in France. Thinkers such as Jacques Derrida (1930–2004), Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995), and Jean-Luc Marion (b. 1946) have each in their own way refashioned the original notions of intentionality and descriptive phenomenology in literary, ethical, and religious directions. Throughout the twentieth century, the phenomenological movement in Continental philosophy has distinguished itself from Anglo-American analytic philosophy in widening the scope of description of meaningful phenomena beyond the linguistic and logical analysis of arguments. Its lasting significance is in its ever-developing holistic and nonreductionist approach to a wide range of human experiences that are capable of patient description of how things appear to us from themselves in manifold ways.

See alsoExistentialism]; Gestalt Psychology; Heidegger, Martin; Merleau-Ponty, Maurice; Sartre, Jean-Paul.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources

Ehrenfels, Christian von. "On 'Gestalt Qualities."' In Foundations of Gestalt Theory, edited by Barry Smith. Munich, 1988. Translation of "U Gestaltqualitäten" (1890).

Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York, 1962. Translation of Sein und Zeit (1926).

Husserl, Edmund. Logical Investigations. Vols. 1 and 2. Edited by Dermot Moran. Translated by J. N. Findlay. New York, 2001. Translation of Logische Untersuchungen (1900–1901).

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. New York, 2002. Translation of Phénoménologie de la perception (1945).